I found myself on an island at the edge of the world. The tide sounded as it had in another time, long before, when I first came here. Its voice had not changed, only I had. I pitched a small tent on the sand. Inside it were three beings: my present self, my younger self who had run away, and a silent animal with amber eyes. The tent was very small. We had to lie pressed against one another. It was uncomfortable to be so close to the one I once was. He gazed at me with an expression both accusing and expectant, as though I had returned to finish something he never could. The animal — thin, delicate, restless — lay between us. He watched the tides. I knew instinctively he was a guide.

When we tried to journey onward, we were stopped. A man barred the door of the bus. He looked only at the dog, never at me, and shook his head. In dreams there is always such a figure — the one who allows or refuses passage. His refusal filled me with anger. Yet the younger self only looked away, as if recognising something inevitable. So we walked instead. Every threshold on that island must be crossed on foot.

I searched for the Spirit-Place, the inner realm I once knew there. But the island was bare of it. Its radiance had withdrawn. The land felt shallow, undecorated, untransfigured. I felt a sadness rise in me, and a fear: perhaps I had grown beyond this place, or perhaps it had grown beyond me. The younger self watched me carefully. He seemed to wait to see whether I would flee, as he once did. The animal pressed against my leg with a warmth that belonged to neither past nor future.

One evening an older man came to the hostel. He lived far from here, yet he too had once come from this land. His eyes were wild with the fever of sudden connection — the old spell of liminal romance. He spoke of a woman he had met the night before. Already he believed she held his future. Already he was betrayed. In a single day his joy had turned to fury. He raised his hand toward the door and cursed. His face was red and bewildered. As I watched him I recognised something of my own past — a former archetype, a man seized by the promise of a life that can only exist outside time, in the thin places. I felt a quiet sorrow for him, and for all those who become lost together in such places.

The animal and I walked across the low-tide flats. The sand was white and glass-like from afar, but sharp as broken stone beneath the skin. The horizon dissolved; sea, sky, and land became one trembling field of light. Birds scurried at the edge of the water. The wind sang in the marram grass. Every sound carried a question. Here the younger self walked beside me. Our bodies cast nearly one shadow. Yet I could feel our separation clearly — he belonged to the island I had known, I to the island as it now was. The animal darted ahead, then returned, as if leading us back into the present moment each time we strayed into memory.

On the evening of the lowest tide, the animal changed. His eyes turned amber in the slanting light. His body moved like a creature born of tide and wind. He no longer behaved like the companion I knew but like the guardian of the exposed underworld. He was the dweller of the low tide, the one who appears when the unconscious reveals its floor. He ran among the kelp and seabirds, nose pressed to the scent of all that decays and renews. Every so often he brushed my leg, reminding me I was not to follow him into that world entirely. By nightfall he lay curled, dreaming fiercely. Something was moving in him — or in me.

I began to search for understanding. I wanted the trip to mean something, to resolve, to yield revelation. But every time I tried to make sense of things, my body refused. Meaning belongs to the spirit realm, but emergence belongs to the body. The body knows when something is forming, and it also knows when it is not time. So I waited. I watched storms pass over the dunes. I watched the light break and mend itself. I listened to the sound of the tide, unchanged across years. The younger self grew quieter. The animal breathed softly at my feet.

The islands themselves shifted shape. Sometimes they appeared worn, collapsed, like paper left in rain. Other times they opened beneath the surface, like flowers seen only by the sea. I felt their sadness. I felt their beauty. I saw how the two pressed against each other until a third thing was made — a kind of truth. And I realised: I was not wandering on a place. I was wandering in a soul.

One morning I walked alone on the flats. The horizon had dissolved entirely into white upon white. There was no seam between anything. I felt a warmth on my temples, a cold flutter beneath it — the sensation of something newly born. And then, without reason or revelation, the struggle ceased. Not resolved — simply suspended. There was no meaning to grasp. Only presence. The younger self stood beside me. He no longer watched me with accusation. The animal pressed his nose into my calf. We all breathed in the same air. I knew then: I was not lost. I had only been searching ahead of myself. I was here. And where I am, I am.